Samsung got in trouble earlier this year when it was presumed that theGalaxy S23had a huge amount of software system files taking up 60GB of storage space. It turns out that theOne UI 5.1storage brouhaha was all a misunderstanding, and the system files actually took up much less space than initially thought. With the next version of One UI, Samsung is apparently changing the way it shows system storage figures to make it easier to understand how much storage space is available.
One UI 6may finally tell the truth about how much storage your Galaxy phone has and stop making it look like it has more storage than it actually does, according to Max Weinbach (viaAndroid Authority).
Samsung used to lump all the storage space that wasn’t taken up by apps and media into the “System” partition, making it look like Samsung’s software was taking up a ton of space. But with One UI 6, Samsung will presumably split that space out into “Other files.”
One UI 6 storage calculation (left) versus One UI 5.1
Asexplained by our own Zachary Kew-Denniss, the system partition in the current version of One UI accounts for the difference between the phone’s advertised storage space and actual storage available to users. This discrepancy is due to storage unit conversion loss. Galaxy phones, like the rest of ourbeloved Android phones, conveniently use “gigabyte” as a measure of storage, but “gibibyte” is the more accurate way of measuring available storage space.
However, they are not the same thing. Gigabytes (GB) are based on powers of 1,000, while gibibytes (GiB) are based on powers of 1,024, resulting in a 7.3% difference. This means that a smartphone with 512GB of advertised onboard storage actually has 476GiB of available storage.
Samsung compensates for this unit conversion loss by incorporating the difference between advertised and actual storage space into the system partition. Samsung’sAndroid 14update will reportedly list this disparity in storage under “other files” for a more accurate representation.
In any case, you’re stillbetter off picking up a variant with more storagethan you normally would choose because Samsung often preloads its smartphones with its own first-party apps, which only duplicate the functionality of Google’s apps and take up a lot of space.
